Perhaps, but I'm still not 100% convinced. For example, what's the answer to
this question?
The forkers would be ignored and cut out.
Since every validation must be signed, it is blatantly apparent who is lying.
Liars or forkers are automatically detected and if they lie enough to meet a threshold can be automatically cut out of the network.
It is all reputation based - so if I have a reputation as a good validator people will choose to trust my node as a validator. This is how the Ripple protocol differs from the Bitcoin protocol.
With the Bitcoin protocol, any third party can mine on the network and exert control. Blocks must be confirmed by miners - thus miners and computational resources are always necessary for Bitcoin to properly function and must always be incentivized. Spamming the block chain is always an option without proper disincentives which inconvenience transactions and defeat the purpose of crypto-currencies even though they may still be better than alternatives.
With Ripple, the main members of the network may choose to accept or ignore validators. Ripple includes a framework for automatically detecting nodes going against the consensus. In the early stages, most validators have vested interests in Ripple's success. Thus, Ripple allows for fewer validators, less computational power, and decentralization/distribution. Imagine taking out all of the spammers, "dust bunnies," and bad guys from the Bitcoin protocol and eliminating mining. How much more efficient a protocol would it be? Even if 80% of validators that somehow managed to gain trust decided to fork Ripple dishonestly the major exchanges, institutions, and people who matter in commerce would cut them out immediately and would never trust them again as validators based on their signatures. The same cannot be said about Bitcoin.
What's more is that Bitcoin cannot change it's core without becoming an entirely different protocol. Building layers on Bitcoin may alleviate load on the block chain, but after the deflationary period this will only result in less fees for miners and less computational power, making Bitcoin vulnerable to the 51% attack as mining for bitcoin creation becomes less profitable. Maintaining the block size as adoption increases will result in higher fees in order to increase incentives for additional computational power in the network to confirm transactions. If we increase the size of blocks we move toward centralization and encounter some of the
same problems. Even then, we still face transaction size limits in order to reduce spam. Imagine clients not paying a transaction fee and building up thousands of fee-less blocks which may take forever to be confirmed by miners since fee-less blocks do not pay. Even if Moore's law results in better connectivity and speed, we are still wasting all this electricity and processing power on mining just to prevent the 51% attack. Ripple helps solve these problems and is a happy medium.
I would rather embrace a distributed, technically unified protocol that will transition from centralized to decentralized than a fragmented, bottlenecked protocol which will transition from decentralized to centralized. Ripple keeps things simple and allows for more functionality in one decentralized API.
It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.
-Albert Einstein
